Always There Will Be Blood
by general zero
Summary: "Always there will be blood," her grandmother says, telling Little Red Riding Hood the story of how her father beat her mother to death, "in the lives of women with wide eyes and long lashes and lithe limbs, for the world will not let beauty be. But if there must be blood, my darling, let it not be you who bleeds." [dark, ace!protag, murder, domestic violence, mob violence]


**Notes: So I was thinking about fairy-tales and how the heroines always get saved instead of saving themselves, and after a long fall down the rabbit hole, this is what I produced.**

 **Warning: non-explicit murder, violence, domestic violence/abuse, mob-violence... it's not a disney fairy-tale, folks.**

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(Nowadays they've shortened her name to Red, and the villagers have forgotten that it ever stood for a cape instead of blood.)

Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother was a beautiful woman. Everyone said so, said it was a shame that she never married again after her husband's accident. It was commonly thought that her granddaughter, with those wide eyes and long lashes and lithe limbs, would grow up to be just like her.

(More than they know.)

It was such a delight to see her skipping into town on Sunday mornings for church, her whimsical hooded cape flying behind her like a May Day streamer. It was perhaps, a bit frivolous, maybe even indecent, to traipse around in such a passionate shade of red… but it made keeping track of the sneaky little hellion easier. The girl was definitely taking her time maturing into a proper young lady, but the villagers blamed it on living all alone in the forest with a permissive old widow. Soon the girl would be settle down, court one of the young men, and move into the village for good. Hopefully the poor young thing wouldn't end up widowed young like her grandmother or dead like her parents. Really, they said, someone ought to do something about those wolves.

(The wolves, a lean fearless pack of monsters with glowing yellow eyes and long bloodstained teeth, have lived in the wood longer than the village has existed. They howl every night.)

Little Red Riding Hood always made the long trek back and forth to her grandmother's alone, for her grandmother had not come into town since the cold misty night she fetched her newly-orphaned grand-daughter from the remains of her parents' farm. At first one or two of the villagers would try to escort her, but despite the vividly visible cape their charge wore, every single attempt resulted in separation. The villagers would search for the lost child until night-time and glimpses of yellow eyes forced them to return to the safety of the village—and the girl would always appear the next Sunday morning, cheerful and oblivious and without a scratch, like she had never heard of wolves or the dangers of the wild woods.

(Her grandmother taught her how to listen to the whispers of leaves rustling and branches scraping each other. Red speaks the language of the woods as readily as she chatters with the villagers.)

When the woodcutter urged his son to court Little Red Riding Hood, the boy was uneasy. He knew more of the woods than many of the villagers—though not enough to be able to follow his fiancé safely through the woods to her grandmother's house for dinner. It was the woodcutter who first whispered the word "witchcraft" when his boy failed to come home. The villagers agreed—but it just couldn't be the poor grieving girl, who came to the funeral service with a black shawl draped over her red riding hood and black gloves sheathing the hands that dropped wild-wood flowers on the casket.

(Red wears black for the woodcutter's boy because he was kind, but she wears gloves because there is dried blood under her fingernails.)

The witch must be Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother, the villagers decided, keeping the poor thing ensorcelled and isolated. The mob left with their torches after church that Sunday, but no amount of priestly exhortation could keep the girl in the red hood from tearing after them into the forest. In her haste she was not as careful as usual, did not ask the trees and the mist to cover her trail—and she was followed. The first person to ever follow her all the way home through the woods to her grandmother's house was the woodcutter, who did not bother with stake and fire. He swung his family's great wood-chopping axe, the one he would have given to his son to be married with and buried with.

("Always there will be blood," her grandmother says, telling Red the story of how her father beat her mother to death, "in the lives of women with wide eyes and long lashes and lithe limbs, for the world will not let beauty be. But if there must be blood, my darling, let it not be you who bleeds.")

The mob never found their witch, the woodcutter never returned home to bury his great axe with his son, and Little Red Riding Hood never came to church anymore. The woods grew darker, less playful, and the wolves grew more numerous and more monstrous. They howled through the nights, and sometimes the villagers swore they heard the voice of a young woman howling with them. They prowled through the nights, and sometimes the villagers swore they could see through the trees the glint of a great axe and the flutter of a blood red hood.

(Nowadays they've shortened her name to Red, and the villagers have forgotten that it ever stood for a cape instead of blood.)

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 **Notes: I wanted to do something with Little Red Riding Hood that was not all about sex bc it seems like every interpretation does that. So instead Red runs with the wolves.**

 **If you liked this, check out my other twisted fairy tale, _Firebrand_.**


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